The Haunted House on Kirby Road

Wow. That was awful.Wow. That was awful. Wow. That was awful. Wow. That was awful. Wow. That was awful. Wow. That was awful.

This movie has, hands down, the most annoying, obnoxious, insufferable cast of 'teenagers' I have ever seen. I don't understand why any of them are friends. I don't understand why any of them HAVE any friends. Even the Final Girl is fairly unlikeable. And don't even get me started on 'Truggers' (The worst nickname in the world, by the way.)- I figure they're all just using him for his stepdad's shed.

I see reviews praising the film's beginning, but I don't get that at all. It's just a bunch of on-the-nose dialogue setting up who's who and what's what and jerks being mean to each other. And don't even get me started on the extended sequence of us watching our 'heroes' watch videos on the internet.

Even as boneheaded as the screenplay was I still chuckled a few times at some of the lines, so at least the actors were putting all they could into their awful characters. But I was more often laughing at things that the filmmakers probably not intend for me to laugh at.

In short, this movie sucks on wheels. Avoid at all costs.

Six young friends watch a video of a haunted house on the internet. One of them recognizes the person in the video. They decide to check out the haunted house on Kirby Road.

It's a low budget Canadian indie horror. The setup is fine if rather plain. The condom scene has one hilarious laugh. It's a good start but it stagnates upon arriving at the house. It takes awhile for the horror to start. In fact, it's well into the second half. The actors are ready to scream but the house is not up to the challenge. It's an indie horror that fails to be scary.

The first say twenty minutes weren't that bad at all. Somehow the director succeeded in picturing the boredom of blasé teens very well, like "chilling" together without a clue how to fill the time or what to talk about. See for instance how they morosely hung in their seats in the haunted house, before the things got rough. There's also a short but brilliant scene when they stop at a gas-station to buy condoms, and the guy at the counter insists on giving an educational demonstration, really hilarious.

But this movie set out to be a horror flick, and here it failed completely. The premise was far fetched to begin with (but hey, what horror-premise isn't?!), and the subsequent goings-on were ludicrous and totally unscary, not even amusing in a campy sort of way.

In short, a superfluous wannabe horrorflick, with in a few scenes the shimmering of real cinematographic potential.

This movie holds it together just enough to eke out a second star and nothing more. Not scary, not funny, not much of anything. Plus the final girl is such a stick in the mud that you end up rooting for the ghost.